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Ten years after her passing, Theo Colburn's legacy continues to grow

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Friday, December 13, 2024

Dr. Theo Colborn, who passed away December 14, 2014, was the founder of the endocrine disruption field, connecting the dots among the different health problems seen in wildlife with those seen in humans, tying them to the endocrine system and to chemical pollutants. She organized the first gathering of scientists in 1991, where the term “endocrine disruption” was coined, and the Wingspread Consensus Statement was written. She co-authored the groundbreaking 1996 book Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story, along with Dianne Dumanoski and Pete Myers, the founder of Environmental Health Sciences (which publishes Environmental Health News). For the 10th anniversary of her passing, we reached out to people who knew her well. We and many others miss her unrelenting passion for raising the scientific curtain on endocrine disruption, for using her eclectic mind in pursuit of all its many manifestations, and not ever giving up, despite dark forces who would rather she’d been quiet.----Fred vom Saal, emeritus professor, University of MissouriOne of Theo’s major skills was her ability to integrate large amounts of information from diverse areas of science. Although her focus was on wildlife, in 1989 Theo read a just published article about findings from studies with litter-bearing laboratory rodents about the life-history reproductive consequences caused by their exquisite sensitivity to very small differences in serum estradiol and testosterone during the vulnerable period of fetal sexual differentiation. The laboratory data was based on whether an animal happened, by chance, to be located in the uterus between female or male littermates, not due to environmental chemicals. This was my work, and it convinced Theo to contact me because she realized this was a part of the puzzle on which she was working. Theo had been studying the disruption of development in wildlife in the Great Lakes region, and she was struck by the similarities in the life-long consequences of fetal exposure to toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes and the life-long consequences in laboratory animals due to their intrauterine position and exposure to very small differences in steroid hormones.This “aha Moment” led Theo to a dramatic departure from the toxicological dogma that “the dose makes the poison” and that only very high exposures to chemical “poisons” were of concern. Instead, in the field of endocrinology the focus was on the exquisite sensitivity to hormones such as estradiol as a result of binding to estrogen receptors at concentrations below a part-per-trillion, with exposure during the fetal period of sexual differentiation being of greatest concern. Her wide-range of reading of the scientific literature led Theo to predict that abnormalities being observed in wildlife could be due to exposure to environmental chemicals that disrupted endocrine function due to chronic exposure to very low doses. This prediction led to Theo organizing the 1991 Wingspread conference on environmental endocrine disrupting chemicals and creation of the new field of environmental endocrine disruption, which has transformed the fields of toxicology as well as endocrinology.----Pete Myers, Environmental Health SciencesIt didn’t take long, after meeting Theo Colborn in 1986, for me to realize she was on to something very big. She had run (yes, run) up to me from the back of a lecture hall where I had been speculating about ways that lipophilic pesticides might be interfering with long-distance migratory orientation in birds. She grabbed me by the shoulders, almost before introducing herself, and proclaimed “Pete, we have to work together.” What a wild and consequential ride that began!At the time I was Senior VP for Science at National Audubon, and I thought it would be simple to create a position for her at Audubon’s DC office where she could benefit from the political knowledge base of staff there and they could help ride the tiger that Theo was creating. Silly me. Theo’s emerging ideas were too bold and threatening for the Audubon DC staff, even with my support. Protecting one’s turf was more important than being at the bleeding edge of a scientific revolution.Fortunately and unexpectedly, another opportunity opened. I was offered the position of director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, and I agreed to join if I could hire a senior science fellow to work with me on new fronts in environmental science. The foundation board agreed, and I hired Theo.Theo moved down to Charlottesville half-time, commuting between there and Washington, D.C. During those six years, I often couldn’t keep up with her prodigious pace and eclectic mind. But we managed to do some crucial things. The first was to convene the 1991 Wingspread meeting, which was the founding meeting of the field that became known as endocrine disruption. The second was to write Our Stolen Future, published in 1996. We both had full-time jobs and neither of us was a gifted writer, but we solved those problems by recruiting Dianne Dumanoski to the team, and getting a royalty advance that could support Dianne’s research and writing.The subtitle of the book is “Are we threatening our fertility, intelligence and survival?” In 1996 we had more questions than answers but enough knowledge in place that we felt it necessary to confront the public with that profound question. While science never ends, now almost 30 years later we can answer that question with a resounding YES!----Tom Zoeller, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, AmherstTheo was a giant in the field and that was clear even during her short career. She once asked me to meet her in Washington, D.C. to meet with congressional staffers to talk about ways to address public health and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. She was frail at the time, so she rented a hotel room with a large living room that would be comfortable for staffers to visit away from their offices on Capitol Hill. The fact that these staffers would take the time to come and discuss endocrine-disrupting chemicals with her was testament to her position in the field. One Republican staffer made the point that even Republicans are concerned about autism and would be more active in crafting legislation if we could assure them that we could identify the cause of autism within a five-year period and for $500,000.----Terry Collins, Teresa Heinz Professor of Green Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon UniversityIn the late 1990s, I read Our Stolen Future and realized chemistry was different to anything I had assumed up to that point; endocrine disruption could not be ignored. Then, as a way to get closer to the field, I arranged a series of high profile university lectures at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in which more than a dozen leaders of endocrine disruption science over several years shared their knowledge of the evolving scientific revolution with the CMU community. Theo gave the first lecture on Monday, April 21, 2003, and we became great friends thereafter with extensive correspondence and regular phone conversations. I became her go-to chemist for fracking and many other things and joined her in Washington, D.C. to discuss the importance of endocrine disruption with Congress-people. Theo once told me she considered me one of her two scientific sons along with Lou Guillette, Jr., which is a treasured compliment. Theo, along with other great endocrine disruption leaders, epically changed my teaching, my deep relationship with the field of chemistry that I love so much, and redirected my research passion to developing better methods for removing endocrine-disrupting chemicals from water. ----John A McLachlan, Professor Emeritus, Tulane UniversityI first met Theo when she came to the Research Triangle Park to visit the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences with her concept of a conference to follow up and define the ideas of environmental perturbation of the endocrine system and development first advanced by Rachel Carlson. We discussed participants for the meeting. Her vision was far beyond what was going on in this field of environmental hormones at that time. Theo said we had to consider all animal species. In doing so and being consistent in this idea she advanced the basic sciences of evolutionary and developmental biology that opened inquiries that are still going on.----Carol Kwiatkowski, The Endocrine Disruption ExchangeI had the privilege of working with Theo on a near daily basis for the last seven years of her life — doing my best to soak up almost a century's worth of wisdom. She was sometimes despondent, afraid we had suffered too much damage to our brains and hearts to muster enough intelligence and empathy to fix the problems we had created. But she never stopped trying to do whatever she could to improve things for future generations. I think she would find hope in the work of many of us from The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX) who continue to not only raise awareness about the harms of endocrine-disrupting chemicals but provide people with concrete recommendations for how to reduce their personal exposure.As Theo would say, "Onward!"

Dr. Theo Colborn, who passed away December 14, 2014, was the founder of the endocrine disruption field, connecting the dots among the different health problems seen in wildlife with those seen in humans, tying them to the endocrine system and to chemical pollutants. She organized the first gathering of scientists in 1991, where the term “endocrine disruption” was coined, and the Wingspread Consensus Statement was written. She co-authored the groundbreaking 1996 book Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story, along with Dianne Dumanoski and Pete Myers, the founder of Environmental Health Sciences (which publishes Environmental Health News). For the 10th anniversary of her passing, we reached out to people who knew her well. We and many others miss her unrelenting passion for raising the scientific curtain on endocrine disruption, for using her eclectic mind in pursuit of all its many manifestations, and not ever giving up, despite dark forces who would rather she’d been quiet.----Fred vom Saal, emeritus professor, University of MissouriOne of Theo’s major skills was her ability to integrate large amounts of information from diverse areas of science. Although her focus was on wildlife, in 1989 Theo read a just published article about findings from studies with litter-bearing laboratory rodents about the life-history reproductive consequences caused by their exquisite sensitivity to very small differences in serum estradiol and testosterone during the vulnerable period of fetal sexual differentiation. The laboratory data was based on whether an animal happened, by chance, to be located in the uterus between female or male littermates, not due to environmental chemicals. This was my work, and it convinced Theo to contact me because she realized this was a part of the puzzle on which she was working. Theo had been studying the disruption of development in wildlife in the Great Lakes region, and she was struck by the similarities in the life-long consequences of fetal exposure to toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes and the life-long consequences in laboratory animals due to their intrauterine position and exposure to very small differences in steroid hormones.This “aha Moment” led Theo to a dramatic departure from the toxicological dogma that “the dose makes the poison” and that only very high exposures to chemical “poisons” were of concern. Instead, in the field of endocrinology the focus was on the exquisite sensitivity to hormones such as estradiol as a result of binding to estrogen receptors at concentrations below a part-per-trillion, with exposure during the fetal period of sexual differentiation being of greatest concern. Her wide-range of reading of the scientific literature led Theo to predict that abnormalities being observed in wildlife could be due to exposure to environmental chemicals that disrupted endocrine function due to chronic exposure to very low doses. This prediction led to Theo organizing the 1991 Wingspread conference on environmental endocrine disrupting chemicals and creation of the new field of environmental endocrine disruption, which has transformed the fields of toxicology as well as endocrinology.----Pete Myers, Environmental Health SciencesIt didn’t take long, after meeting Theo Colborn in 1986, for me to realize she was on to something very big. She had run (yes, run) up to me from the back of a lecture hall where I had been speculating about ways that lipophilic pesticides might be interfering with long-distance migratory orientation in birds. She grabbed me by the shoulders, almost before introducing herself, and proclaimed “Pete, we have to work together.” What a wild and consequential ride that began!At the time I was Senior VP for Science at National Audubon, and I thought it would be simple to create a position for her at Audubon’s DC office where she could benefit from the political knowledge base of staff there and they could help ride the tiger that Theo was creating. Silly me. Theo’s emerging ideas were too bold and threatening for the Audubon DC staff, even with my support. Protecting one’s turf was more important than being at the bleeding edge of a scientific revolution.Fortunately and unexpectedly, another opportunity opened. I was offered the position of director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, and I agreed to join if I could hire a senior science fellow to work with me on new fronts in environmental science. The foundation board agreed, and I hired Theo.Theo moved down to Charlottesville half-time, commuting between there and Washington, D.C. During those six years, I often couldn’t keep up with her prodigious pace and eclectic mind. But we managed to do some crucial things. The first was to convene the 1991 Wingspread meeting, which was the founding meeting of the field that became known as endocrine disruption. The second was to write Our Stolen Future, published in 1996. We both had full-time jobs and neither of us was a gifted writer, but we solved those problems by recruiting Dianne Dumanoski to the team, and getting a royalty advance that could support Dianne’s research and writing.The subtitle of the book is “Are we threatening our fertility, intelligence and survival?” In 1996 we had more questions than answers but enough knowledge in place that we felt it necessary to confront the public with that profound question. While science never ends, now almost 30 years later we can answer that question with a resounding YES!----Tom Zoeller, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, AmherstTheo was a giant in the field and that was clear even during her short career. She once asked me to meet her in Washington, D.C. to meet with congressional staffers to talk about ways to address public health and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. She was frail at the time, so she rented a hotel room with a large living room that would be comfortable for staffers to visit away from their offices on Capitol Hill. The fact that these staffers would take the time to come and discuss endocrine-disrupting chemicals with her was testament to her position in the field. One Republican staffer made the point that even Republicans are concerned about autism and would be more active in crafting legislation if we could assure them that we could identify the cause of autism within a five-year period and for $500,000.----Terry Collins, Teresa Heinz Professor of Green Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon UniversityIn the late 1990s, I read Our Stolen Future and realized chemistry was different to anything I had assumed up to that point; endocrine disruption could not be ignored. Then, as a way to get closer to the field, I arranged a series of high profile university lectures at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in which more than a dozen leaders of endocrine disruption science over several years shared their knowledge of the evolving scientific revolution with the CMU community. Theo gave the first lecture on Monday, April 21, 2003, and we became great friends thereafter with extensive correspondence and regular phone conversations. I became her go-to chemist for fracking and many other things and joined her in Washington, D.C. to discuss the importance of endocrine disruption with Congress-people. Theo once told me she considered me one of her two scientific sons along with Lou Guillette, Jr., which is a treasured compliment. Theo, along with other great endocrine disruption leaders, epically changed my teaching, my deep relationship with the field of chemistry that I love so much, and redirected my research passion to developing better methods for removing endocrine-disrupting chemicals from water. ----John A McLachlan, Professor Emeritus, Tulane UniversityI first met Theo when she came to the Research Triangle Park to visit the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences with her concept of a conference to follow up and define the ideas of environmental perturbation of the endocrine system and development first advanced by Rachel Carlson. We discussed participants for the meeting. Her vision was far beyond what was going on in this field of environmental hormones at that time. Theo said we had to consider all animal species. In doing so and being consistent in this idea she advanced the basic sciences of evolutionary and developmental biology that opened inquiries that are still going on.----Carol Kwiatkowski, The Endocrine Disruption ExchangeI had the privilege of working with Theo on a near daily basis for the last seven years of her life — doing my best to soak up almost a century's worth of wisdom. She was sometimes despondent, afraid we had suffered too much damage to our brains and hearts to muster enough intelligence and empathy to fix the problems we had created. But she never stopped trying to do whatever she could to improve things for future generations. I think she would find hope in the work of many of us from The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX) who continue to not only raise awareness about the harms of endocrine-disrupting chemicals but provide people with concrete recommendations for how to reduce their personal exposure.As Theo would say, "Onward!"



Dr. Theo Colborn, who passed away December 14, 2014, was the founder of the endocrine disruption field, connecting the dots among the different health problems seen in wildlife with those seen in humans, tying them to the endocrine system and to chemical pollutants.

She organized the first gathering of scientists in 1991, where the term “endocrine disruption” was coined, and the Wingspread Consensus Statement was written. She co-authored the groundbreaking 1996 book Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story, along with Dianne Dumanoski and Pete Myers, the founder of Environmental Health Sciences (which publishes Environmental Health News).

For the 10th anniversary of her passing, we reached out to people who knew her well. We and many others miss her unrelenting passion for raising the scientific curtain on endocrine disruption, for using her eclectic mind in pursuit of all its many manifestations, and not ever giving up, despite dark forces who would rather she’d been quiet.

----

Fred vom Saal, emeritus professor, University of Missouri

One of Theo’s major skills was her ability to integrate large amounts of information from diverse areas of science. Although her focus was on wildlife, in 1989 Theo read a just published article about findings from studies with litter-bearing laboratory rodents about the life-history reproductive consequences caused by their exquisite sensitivity to very small differences in serum estradiol and testosterone during the vulnerable period of fetal sexual differentiation. The laboratory data was based on whether an animal happened, by chance, to be located in the uterus between female or male littermates, not due to environmental chemicals. This was my work, and it convinced Theo to contact me because she realized this was a part of the puzzle on which she was working. Theo had been studying the disruption of development in wildlife in the Great Lakes region, and she was struck by the similarities in the life-long consequences of fetal exposure to toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes and the life-long consequences in laboratory animals due to their intrauterine position and exposure to very small differences in steroid hormones.

This “aha Moment” led Theo to a dramatic departure from the toxicological dogma that “the dose makes the poison” and that only very high exposures to chemical “poisons” were of concern. Instead, in the field of endocrinology the focus was on the exquisite sensitivity to hormones such as estradiol as a result of binding to estrogen receptors at concentrations below a part-per-trillion, with exposure during the fetal period of sexual differentiation being of greatest concern. Her wide-range of reading of the scientific literature led Theo to predict that abnormalities being observed in wildlife could be due to exposure to environmental chemicals that disrupted endocrine function due to chronic exposure to very low doses. This prediction led to Theo organizing the 1991 Wingspread conference on environmental endocrine disrupting chemicals and creation of the new field of environmental endocrine disruption, which has transformed the fields of toxicology as well as endocrinology.

----

Pete Myers, Environmental Health Sciences

It didn’t take long, after meeting Theo Colborn in 1986, for me to realize she was on to something very big. She had run (yes, run) up to me from the back of a lecture hall where I had been speculating about ways that lipophilic pesticides might be interfering with long-distance migratory orientation in birds. She grabbed me by the shoulders, almost before introducing herself, and proclaimed “Pete, we have to work together.” What a wild and consequential ride that began!

At the time I was Senior VP for Science at National Audubon, and I thought it would be simple to create a position for her at Audubon’s DC office where she could benefit from the political knowledge base of staff there and they could help ride the tiger that Theo was creating. Silly me. Theo’s emerging ideas were too bold and threatening for the Audubon DC staff, even with my support. Protecting one’s turf was more important than being at the bleeding edge of a scientific revolution.


Fortunately and unexpectedly, another opportunity opened. I was offered the position of director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, and I agreed to join if I could hire a senior science fellow to work with me on new fronts in environmental science. The foundation board agreed, and I hired Theo.

Theo moved down to Charlottesville half-time, commuting between there and Washington, D.C. During those six years, I often couldn’t keep up with her prodigious pace and eclectic mind. But we managed to do some crucial things. The first was to convene the 1991 Wingspread meeting, which was the founding meeting of the field that became known as endocrine disruption. The second was to write Our Stolen Future, published in 1996. We both had full-time jobs and neither of us was a gifted writer, but we solved those problems by recruiting Dianne Dumanoski to the team, and getting a royalty advance that could support Dianne’s research and writing.

The subtitle of the book is “Are we threatening our fertility, intelligence and survival?” In 1996 we had more questions than answers but enough knowledge in place that we felt it necessary to confront the public with that profound question. While science never ends, now almost 30 years later we can answer that question with a resounding YES!

----

Tom Zoeller, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Theo was a giant in the field and that was clear even during her short career. She once asked me to meet her in Washington, D.C. to meet with congressional staffers to talk about ways to address public health and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. She was frail at the time, so she rented a hotel room with a large living room that would be comfortable for staffers to visit away from their offices on Capitol Hill. The fact that these staffers would take the time to come and discuss endocrine-disrupting chemicals with her was testament to her position in the field. One Republican staffer made the point that even Republicans are concerned about autism and would be more active in crafting legislation if we could assure them that we could identify the cause of autism within a five-year period and for $500,000.

----

Terry Collins, Teresa Heinz Professor of Green Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon University

In the late 1990s, I read Our Stolen Future and realized chemistry was different to anything I had assumed up to that point; endocrine disruption could not be ignored. Then, as a way to get closer to the field, I arranged a series of high profile university lectures at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in which more than a dozen leaders of endocrine disruption science over several years shared their knowledge of the evolving scientific revolution with the CMU community. Theo gave the first lecture on Monday, April 21, 2003, and we became great friends thereafter with extensive correspondence and regular phone conversations. I became her go-to chemist for fracking and many other things and joined her in Washington, D.C. to discuss the importance of endocrine disruption with Congress-people. Theo once told me she considered me one of her two scientific sons along with Lou Guillette, Jr., which is a treasured compliment.

Theo, along with other great endocrine disruption leaders, epically changed my teaching, my deep relationship with the field of chemistry that I love so much, and redirected my research passion to developing better methods for removing endocrine-disrupting chemicals from water.

----

John A McLachlan, Professor Emeritus, Tulane University

I first met Theo when she came to the Research Triangle Park to visit the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences with her concept of a conference to follow up and define the ideas of environmental perturbation of the endocrine system and development first advanced by Rachel Carlson. We discussed participants for the meeting. Her vision was far beyond what was going on in this field of environmental hormones at that time. Theo said we had to consider all animal species. In doing so and being consistent in this idea she advanced the basic sciences of evolutionary and developmental biology that opened inquiries that are still going on.

----

Carol Kwiatkowski, The Endocrine Disruption Exchange

I had the privilege of working with Theo on a near daily basis for the last seven years of her life — doing my best to soak up almost a century's worth of wisdom. She was sometimes despondent, afraid we had suffered too much damage to our brains and hearts to muster enough intelligence and empathy to fix the problems we had created. But she never stopped trying to do whatever she could to improve things for future generations. I think she would find hope in the work of many of us from The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX) who continue to not only raise awareness about the harms of endocrine-disrupting chemicals but provide people with concrete recommendations for how to reduce their personal exposure.

As Theo would say, "Onward!"

Read the full story here.
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Right whales have a longer lifespan than scientists thought

Right whales in the Southern Ocean have a median lifespan of around 74 years. And they can live for up to 130 years, twice as long as scientists thought. The post Right whales have a longer lifespan than scientists thought first appeared on EarthSky.

This is a Southern right whale in waters off South Australia in 2006. Scientists recently found that Southern right whales have a median lifespan of around 74 years. But they can live up to 130 years of age, twice as long as scientists thought. Image via robdownunder/ Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). Southern right whales live long lives. These sea mammals, which live in the Southern Ocean, have a median lifespan of about 74 years. But some individuals reach 130 years, much longer than previously estimated. North Atlantic right whales face human-induced threats. They have a much shorter median lifespan of 22 years, primarily due to ship strikes, fishing gear entanglement and environmental changes. Whale lifespan data is helpful for conservation efforts. Understanding whale longevity and population dynamics helps shape policies to promote recovery and protect their cultural knowledge passed through older individuals. Right whales can live as long as 130 years Right whales are a docile, migratory whale species that use filters in their mouths to catch small crustaceans in the ocean. The right whales that live in the North Atlantic only have a median lifespan of 22 years, due to human activities in their waters. Meanwhile, right whales in the Southern Ocean have a lifespan of around 74 years. But the University of Alaska Fairbanks said on December 20, 2024, that Southern right whales can live up to 130 years of age, twice as long as they thought. Right whales are a type of baleen whale. The filter in their mouths is called a baleen plate. The scientists published their study in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances on December 20, 2024. The 2025 EarthSky Lunar Calendar is now available! A unique and beautiful poster-sized calendar. Get yours today! Photographs identify and track right whales For the past 40 years, researchers have been studying and photographing individual right whales. South African scientists have been monitoring Southern right whales (Eubalaena australis). Meanwhile, North American scientists have been collecting data on the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis). Both species are closely related and have similar life histories. Each whale has a unique pattern of thickened skin on the head, called callosities. So you can identify individuals by their unique callosity head pattern. Researchers have been identifying individual right whales in the photographs and tracking them from one year to the next. Just as important, they have taken note of which whales stopped appearing in photos over subsequent years, presumably due to death. The head of a North Atlantic right whale, showing thickened skin on the head, or callosities. These markings are like a unique fingerprint to each whale. Image via Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, NOAA Research Permit # 775-1875/ Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Survivorship curves In this new study, scientists conducted a mathematical analysis of right whale sighting records based on those 40 years of photographs, concentrating on female whales. (They first identified them as females by the presence of a calf.) The researchers used this data to construct survivorship curves. This is a graph that displays projected life expectancies, showing the proportion of a population that survives to each age. (Insurance companies use a similar technique to calculate human life expectancies.) This graph shows survivorship curves for female right whales. The curves are based on 40 years of photographic identifications. Here, scientists were able to mathematically project a very long lifespan for Southern right whales. In contrast, the blue curve for North Atlantic right whales shows significantly shorter lifespans due to human-caused activities such as net entanglements and ship collisions. The light dotted line shows how humans compare on the survivorship curves (using data from the Social Security Administration). Figure via Greg Breed/ The Conversation. Used with permission. Different life expectancies for different populations Scientists once thought the longest-living Southern right whales were 70 to 75 years old. But the new research indicates their median lifespan is about 74 years. Moreover, a few individuals can be 130 years of age, while the oldest ones could reach the ripe old age of 150 years. In contrast, their data also showed the median lifespan of North Atlantic right whales was only 22 years, with a few individuals making it to 45 years. Greg Breed, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said that Northern Atlantic right whales’ significantly shorter lifespans were due to human activities: North Atlantic whales have unusually short lifespans compared to other whales, but this isn’t because of intrinsic differences in biology, and they should live much longer. They’re frequently tangled in fishing gear or struck by ships, and they suffer from starvation, potentially linked to environmental changes we don’t fully understand. A Southern right whale and calf. Image via Els Vermeulen/ University of Alaska Fairbanks. Baleen whale lifespans may have been underestimated According to Breed, there had long been a lack of information about the ages of whales, leading to underestimates about their lifespans. He said: We didn’t know how to age baleen whales until 1955, which was the very end of industrial whaling. By the time we figured it out, there weren’t many old whales left to study. So, we just assumed they didn’t live that long. Current data on longevity, the scientists proposed, have been skewed by the absence of older whales decimated during industrial whaling. That industry ended just 60 years ago for most whale species. By then, many populations were less than 10% of their original size. Whale lifespan studies help guide conservation policies For most marine mammal species, an understanding of a population’s characteristics, such as lifespan, is essential for assessing how they are threatened by human activities. That, in turn, helps cooperating governments shape policy to aid in their conservation. Breed said: To attain healthy populations that include old animals, recovery might take hundreds of years. For animals that live to be 100 or 130 and only give birth to a surviving calf every 10 years or so, slow recovery is to be expected. He added that older whales are critically important to a healthy population: There’s a growing recognition that recovery isn’t just about biomass or the number of individuals. It’s about the knowledge these animals pass along to the next generation. That knowledge isn’t just genetic, it’s cultural and behavioral. Older individuals teach survival skills. Younger animals learn by observing and copying the strategies of the older ones. Breed and his colleagues are expanding their research to other whale species to learn more about their lifespans. And they hope to better understand how whaling has impacted elder individuals and the recovery trends that lie ahead. Bottom line: Right whales in the Southern Ocean have a median lifespan of around 74 years. And they can live up to 130 years of age, twice as long as scientists thought. Source: Extreme longevity may be the rule not the exception in Balaenid whales Source: Whales can live way longer than scientists had thought, with potential lifespans as much as double previous estimate Via University of Alaska Fairbanks Read more: ‘Listening’ to save the North Atlantic right whaleThe post Right whales have a longer lifespan than scientists thought first appeared on EarthSky.

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Finalized Tax Credit for Cleaner Hydrogen Gets a Cautious OK From Some Environmental Groups

The Biden administration released long-awaited final rules Friday for a tax credit that will send billions of dollars to producers of cleaner hydrogen

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Energy

California tribes celebrate historic dam removal: ‘More successful than we ever imagined’

After four dams were blasted from the Klamath River, the work to restore the ecosystem is under wayExplosions roared through the canyons lining the Klamath River earlier this year, signaling a new chapter for the region that hugs the Oregon-California border.In October, the removal of four hydroelectric dams built on the river was completed – the largest project of its kind in US history. Continue reading...

Explosions roared through the canyons lining the Klamath River earlier this year, signaling a new chapter for the region that hugs the Oregon-California border.In October, the removal of four hydroelectric dams built on the river was completed – the largest project of its kind in US history.The blast of the final dam was just the beginning. The work to restore the river, which winds 263 miles (423km) from the volcanic Cascade mountain range in Oregon to the Pacific coast in northern California, is now under way.Already it’s been among the most hopeful environmental stories of past years. “It has been more successful than we ever imagined,” said Ren Brownell, the spokesperson for the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, a non-profit created to oversee and implement the removal, adding: “There’s an incredible amount of joy.”The Copco 2 Dam, before and after. Photograph: Swiftwater FilmsA drastic alterationThe Klamath River was once an ecological powerhouse – the third-largest salmon-producing river in the American west. Its basin covered more than 9.4m acres (3.8m hectares) and its network of wetlands was the largest in the region. The ecosystem was home to millions of migrating birds. Tribes, including the Hoopa, Karuk, Klamath, Modoc and Yurok, thrived in this bountiful and beautiful watershed for thousands of years, with the river providing both sustenance and ritual.Over the last hundred years, these landscapes have been drastically altered.After the first dam began operating in 1918 – one of four that would eventually be forged in the lower Klamath to provide hydroelectric power to communities nearby – the course of the river was changed. The dams obstructed the migration of salmon and other native species, which help carry nutrients into the systems from the ocean, to cascading effects.They also held on to huge stores of sediment that would otherwise have flowed downriver, and created shallow reservoirs that quickly heated when the weather warmed. Increased water temperatures in the river allowed toxic algal blooms to thrive.In recent decades, the climate crisis has turned up the dial, deepening droughts and fueling a rise in catastrophic fire as the region grows ever hotter. The impacts only increased as more water was diverted to support the farming and ranching in the region, and more habitat was altered by mining and logging.Twenty-eight types of salmon and steelhead trout, seen as indicator species that represent the health of the ecosystems they live in, have been listed as threatened or endangered.As the Klamath ecosystem deteriorated, there was growing recognition that removing the dams would be a crucial first step in helping the region recover and build resilience in a warming world.But, faced with a strong resistance to change in local communities tucked around the reservoirs and a long history of difficult battles over water in the parched landscapes in the west, dam removal seemed all but impossible. The land for the dams was taken from tribes during the throes of colonization and development and more recently supported energy corporations that had shareholders to answer to.Then, in 2002, disaster struck. Algae flourished in the shallow warming waters that year, exacerbated by the dams and decisions from the US Bureau of Reclamation to divert vital flows to farms, leaving little for fish. The event killed 70,000 salmon and thousands of other species, resulting in one of the worst die-offs ever to occur in the US.The layers of fish floating belly-up sent an important signal of the horrors that could continue into the future if the dams remained. Forming a coalition, tribes up and down the Klamath launched a fierce campaign to educate the public, inform the shareholders of the companies that owned and operated the dams, and petition their boards. They protested and attended public hearings, and engaged with state and federal officials.‘A tremendous rollercoaster’It took decades of advocacy to convince PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, to let go of the aging infrastructure straddling the Oregon-California border. But in the mid-aughts, assured by shifts in public opinion and incentivized by the steep costs to relicense the dams, the company agreed it was time to see them go.In November 2020, roughly 20 years after the die-off, an agreement was forged between a long list of stakeholders that included tribal and state governments and federal agencies. The Klamath River Renewal Corporation was created to oversee and implement the removal.The organization had to help bring residents near the reservoirs on board, navigate dozens of species-management plans, and model how outdoor-recreation enthusiasts could continue to enjoy the river. Ranchers and fishers, environmentalists and farmers, and locals and visitors all had connections to the basin, and were eager to weigh in.“It has been a tremendous rollercoaster,” said Brownell. “Having the river’s health in your hands is an incredible burden to carry.”Brownell, who grew up along the riverbanks, was standing in the canyon as the blast of the first dam released flows and the river that had been held over the last hundred years found its way back to itself.“I got to watch the water come down through the canyon and reconnect with the river below. I watched the river re-establish itself there forevermore,” she said. It was the most exciting moment of the year.The Iron Gate Dam, one of the four hydroelectric dams that once stood on the Klamath River, on 18 August 2023. Photograph: Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times/Getty ImagesMoments of traumaThere were moments of trauma along the way. Over the 100 years the dams were standing, they had held back 15m cubic yards of sediment. When the dams were removed, the heavy dead organic matter had to run downriver, soaking up oxygen in the water. Extensive modeling had predicted a severe impact on aquatic life, but no one knew how bad it would get or how long it would take for the river to regain its health. Some models predicted the suffocating conditions could linger for up to a month.“I was braced and prepared but it was still tremendously hard,” said Brownell, recalling how the water, rid of oxygen, looked like oil as it cascaded through its banks.“You can easily compare a river’s health to an individual’s health,” she said. “Often when someone is sick, they are going to get worse before they get better. We essentially performed a quadruple bypass on the river this last year – we knew there would be short-term impacts.”“The whole time everyone was so excited because it felt like the start of something – I just felt sick,” she said.Leaf Hillman a Karuk tribal ceremonial leader who has dedicated decades to seeing this project come to fruition, helped keep hopes high with assurances that these were signs of healing.“For me it was beautiful,” he said, recalling how he felt even when the rushing waters became clouded by silt. “I could envision what it was going to look like – a restored river.”In the end, the river lacked oxygen for only two 24-hour periods, a far shorter time than scientists had feared.The Iron Gate, before and after. Photograph: Swiftwater FilmsThe real work beginsAs 2025 begins, so does the real work.“It is a new era for us – there are good things to come,” Hillman said.He is looking forward to the work ahead, especially the work to ensure fish can reach “pristine habitat” in tributaries above the Upper Klamath Lake.With 400 miles (644km) of habitat for salmon and other native species restored, and 2,200 acres (890 hectares) made available after spending a century submerged, stakeholders are envisioning a future for these lands and those who rely on them. Already, native seeds have been strewn along the banks and in the areas once vibrant with vegetation.There have already been strong signs of their success.In late November, threatened coho salmon were seen in the upper Klamath River basin for the first time in more than 60 years, according to the California department of fish and wildlife. Other animals are benefiting, too, including north-western pond turtles, freshwater mussels, beavers and river otters.Strong winter rains have also helped the rebound. “The river is doing what rivers do – redistributing sediments,” Hillman said, calling the gift of wet weather the “icing on the cake”.“We have a lot more work to do,” he added, “but it’s a good omen.”The roughly 2,800 acres (1,133 hectares) of land sacred to the Shasta Indian Nation that had been drowned and buried under a reservoir created by one of the dams has been returned to them. The Kikacéki and Kutarawaxu bands who once called the area home were decimated by colonists in the 1800s, after the lure of gold, mining, logging and ranching drew throngs of people to the region. The small tribe that remained was then pushed from their homes through eminent domain to make way for construction of the dams to begin.A salmon in a Klamath River tributary in October. Photograph: APThe Guardian was unable to speak to representatives of Shasta Indian Nation on record, but they have recounted the painful history endured by their ancestors and what the next chapter means to them.“Today is a turning point in the history of the Shasta people,” Janice Crowe, the Shasta Indian Nation chair, told AZCentral, . “Now we can return home, return to culture, return to ceremony and begin to weave a new story for the next generation of Shasta, who will get to call our ancestral lands home once again.”With successes, though, there may still be setbacks. The water is still turbid as the river continues to cleanse itself of sediment. There’s a lot of data to wade through and challenges to overcome. The effects of the climate crisis will continue to unfold.The Klamath River flows where the Iron Gate reservoir once was. Photograph: Carlos Avila Gonzalez/APIn the farther parts of the river, Klamath tribal leaders are still waiting to see the salmon that were lost to their homelands more than 100 years ago. Dams still stand in the northern stretches of the river.‘It’s a river again’But for advocates, the dams’ removal on its own serves as a strong reminder that change is possible.Toz Soto, a fish biologist and manager of the Karuk Tribe fisheries program, said with a laugh that he was skeptical right up until the moment they blasted through the concrete. But, by convincing the public that removing the dams made sense, “not just as a social justice issue for tribal health but also from an economic standpoint”, he said, the wheels of change started to turn.As the work continues, Soto is looking upon it with a smile.“There were moments, and those are behind me,” he said. He’s hopeful for the future, and excited to start the reintroduction of spring-run chinook salmon that otherwise would never have had a chance. Water conditions will continue to improve with time, and they are already far better than they were a year ago.“It is quite impressive,” he added. “I am so programmed going up there to look at a funky nasty reservoir. Now it’s just like – wow. It’s a river again.”

Animals
Climate
Culture

Why thousands of people are traveling to one country to see these birds

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. Haga clic aquí para leer esta historia en español. VALLE DEL CAUCA, Colombia — From the side of an old highway that cuts through the Andean foothills, Dora Alicia […]

A crimson-rumped toucanet at a popular birdwatching destination in southwestern Colombia called La Florida. This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. Haga clic aquí para leer esta historia en español. VALLE DEL CAUCA, Colombia — From the side of an old highway that cuts through the Andean foothills, Dora Alicia Londoño’s home looks unremarkable. Located in a rural area about two hours from Cali, the largest city in southern Colombia, it’s a simple, two-story concrete building with a sheet metal roof. A few potted plants hang from the rafters.  The main attraction is in her backyard.  There, you will find birds. So many birds. And these are not just your common backyard varieties, like robins and bluejays, but rare forest species that birdwatchers around the world yearn to see. Londoño, 63, has turned her home into a birdwatching lodge, a paradise. There are five guest rooms and a cafe with a view into her backyard, a dense tropical forest. There, she has a homemade bird feeder: wooden shelves holding pieces of fruit. Upstairs, on the roof, she had additional feeders for hummingbirds. When I visited on a warm morning in October, it felt like stepping into a nature documentary. The backyard was teeming with birds, none of which I’d seen before: glistening green mountain tanagers, toucan barbets, lemon-browed flycatchers, velvet-purple coronets. These birds were so colorful they almost looked unreal, painting the yard with streaks of yellows, reds, blues, and purples. And then there was the noise — a clamor of cheeps, trills, and squawks.   “The toucan barbet is one of the rarest birds in the world and it just eats bananas right here,” said Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela, a Colombian-born conservation ecologist and bird expert at the University of California Santa Cruz, who was at Londoño’s with me that morning. In an hour or so, I saw about 45 different species, Ocampo-Peñuela estimates, while leisurely sipping coffee and eating empanadas. If this is birdwatching, I’m in. If you’re into birds, Colombia is the place to be. It has more avian species than any other country on Earth, with close to 2,000 distinct and often very beautiful varieties, nearly 20 percent of the world’s birds. That diversity is rooted in geography. Colombia is a mosaic of different habitats, from tropical rainforest to snow-capped mountains, and different birds have adapted to each of them. And as I experienced that morning, birding here can be incredibly easy. You don’t even need hiking shoes. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r<e.length;r++)if(e[r].contentWindow===a.source){var i=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";e[r].style.height=i}}}))}(); This isn’t much of a secret. In the last decade, the activity of birdwatching has exploded in Colombia, said Ocampo-Peñuela, who also studies ecotourism. Activity on eBird, a platform where birders can record their observations, increased more than 27-fold in Colombia since 2010, according to unpublished research by Ocampo-Peñuela and other authors that’s currently under review. While the bulk of these birders are foreigners from places like the US and Canada, more and more Colombians are picking up the hobby, too, she said.  This burgeoning industry is, as many experts argue, a rare force of good. It’s funneling money into rural communities and creating material value for healthy forests — something the environmental movement has, for decades, struggled to do. Indeed, at a time when tropical forests and grasslands are besieged by farming, mining, and other threats, birdwatching tourism offers a real incentive to keep ecosystems intact. Without forests, there are no birds, no birders, and no birding tourism.  There are, no doubt, concerns about sustainability as this young industry matures and more foreign tourists descend on Colombia. But for now, local communities are at the helm of this industry, which is good for people, good for the local economy, and good for wildlife. They intend to keep it that way. Londoño, who goes by Doña Dora, didn’t dream of running a birdwatching lodge and welcoming tourists into her backyard. In the 1990s, she moved here, to the outskirts of Cali, to escape violence near her home in the tropical grasslands, known as Los Llanos. This story is not uncommon. A decades-long conflict between armed groups and the government has displaced more than 5 million people across the country.  Doña Dora arrived with nothing, she told me that morning, as we watched hummingbirds flutter around a pair of freshly filled feeders like a collection of airborne jewels. She cleaned homes and sold empanadas on the side of the road. Her husband picked up odd jobs. Then one day she went to the dentist, and her life changed.  Her dentist, a man named Gilberto Collazos Bolaños, was a bird fanatic, and he knew the forest around her home was full of avian life. So he gave her a suggestion: Put some fruit on a table outside, and wait. The fruit will draw in birds, she remembers him saying, the birds will attract tourists, and the tourists will bring in money. She took his advice. And birds came. First there were bluebirds, golden tanagers, and colorful finches called euphonias. Then rarer species like rufous-throated tanagers and toucan barbets arrived. Toucan barbets are the unequivocal stars of the show. Found only in the mountain forests of western Colombia and Ecuador, they have a brilliant plumage — a collection of light gray, red, yellow, and black — and a song that sounds a bit like a frog. As the dentist predicted, birders eventually arrived, too, largely finding her home by word of mouth. And in 2015, Colombia hosted its first annual BirdFair, a major birding festival, and one of the event’s official field trips was a visit to Doña Dora’s home. That put her on the map, she told me.  “We always loved nature and trees,” said Doña Dora, who, when I visited, was wearing a head covering and what looked like a white lab coat. “But we didn’t have a vision for what we have right now, of birdwatching.” Today, her home is considered one of the country’s top birdwatching destinations, and some visitors have dubbed it “the best backyard birding spot in the world.” It’s this birding business that now supports her family.  Foreign tourists pay about $9 to view birds on her property ($13 if they have a camera). A room for two people is around $50 per night, which doesn’t include her coffee or her homemade empanadas. In the busy season, from September to March, the lodge will get more than 100 tourists a month, according to her son Elber Sanchez Londoño, who helps run the business. In her backyard that morning, I watched birds. But I also watched birdwatchers watch birds. I honestly found this activity just as thrilling.  What is it that makes some people so obsessed with birds? One explanation is that you can find them pretty much everywhere. That makes birdwatching easy to start and practice, no matter where you live. Birding can also connect you to a community. It tends to bring like-minded people together, both in person and through platforms like eBird and iNaturalist, where they can share their observations. Plus, it’s free and done outdoors, which is one reason why birding became so popular during the Covid-19 pandemic when people were avoiding crowded, indoor spaces. “It’s like an addiction,” Ocampo-Peñuela, a self-identified birder, told me. “You see these birds, and their beauty, and it just fills you with happy hormones. Then you want to do it more.” That morning, I met several tourists at Doña Dora’s lodge. Most of them toted cameras with long lenses. “This is unbelievable,” said Santiago Ferro, a visitor from Toronto, who grew up in Bogotá. I asked him how this spot compares to birding in North America. He just laughed. Birders are drawn to Colombia for its sheer number of avian species, many of which are found nowhere else. But the ongoing surge in birding tourism has far more to do with safety. Until recently, a conflict between the government and a number of armed groups spread violence across Colombia. At the center of the conflict — which began in the mid-20th century — was the distribution of wealth. The largest such group, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), fought against the government and right-wing paramilitary groups to bring more wealth to poor rural parts of Colombia. Violence tied to the conflict killed more than 200,000 people, and most of them were civilians. In 2016, after years of tense negotiations, the government and FARC signed a peace agreement. Put simply, the agreement required that FARC give up their weapons, stop fighting, and exit the drug trade, which was helping fund the conflict. In return they were offered political power and a promise to invest heavily in rural areas.  Violence still persists in some regions, especially near the borders, and the US State Department advises people to reconsider traveling to Colombia. Yet a tenuous truce holds. The peace agreement has made the country much safer, for locals and foreigners alike, than it has been for decades — and that, in turn, has opened the door to more birdwatching tourism.  In 2017, Ocampo-Peñuela published a study showing that birdwatching, as measured by activity on eBird, was already expanding in areas that were once considered dangerous, including Putumayo, a department in southern Colombia. Ocampo-Peñuela’s more recent research, which is not yet published, finds that birdwatching activity skyrocketed in Colombia after 2016, though it dipped during the pandemic. (A large portion of eBird users are from the US, so data from the platform over-represents American birding trends.) !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r&lt;e.length;r++)if(e[r].contentWindow===a.source){var i=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";e[r].style.height=i}}}))}(); The government doesn’t track birdwatching activity, though it says tourism overall is climbing. Last year, a record 6.1 million foreigners visited Colombia, up 30 percent from 2022, and the majority of them are looking for nature experiences, according to Procolombia, a government agency that markets the country. Tourism is already up this year compared to 2023, Procolombia told Vox. And since 2021, the number of nature lodges, including birding lodges, has nearly tripled, the agency said.  In global hot spots of biodiversity like Colombia, economic growth often comes at the expense of ecosystems. A growing cattle-ranching industry destroys rainforests. A mining boom leaches toxins into streams and soil. Comparatively, Colombia’s ballooning birdwatching industry seems like something to celebrate.  Tourism is not only funding birdwatching destinations like Doña Dora’s but building demand for local birdwatching guides. That’s created jobs for Colombians with deep ties to their surrounding ecosystems, whether or not they have a formal education. Generational knowledge of local birds and where to find them — referred to in some academic circles as traditional ecological knowledge — is increasingly valuable here, even in a straight economic sense. Birdwatching tourism gives it value. The following morning, I traveled to a place called Laguna de Sonso, a wetland just north of Cali. It’s a blip of natural habitat in a sea of sugarcane plantations, a widespread crop in Valle del Cauca. When I arrived, a cocoi heron, a large gray and white bird with a long, sharp beak, was wading in the water, sending ripples out across a lake. The wetland is a birder’s dream. More than 300 avian species live in or pass through Laguna de Sonso, including giants like the osprey and weirdos like the common potoo, a bird with an unsettlingly wide mouth. It’s also where youth from the surrounding communities learn to become birdwatching guides, or interpreters, as they call themselves. “We call ourselves interpreters because we are a community that has had empirical training,” said local guide Jhonathan Estiven Bedoya Betancourth, meaning they’ve learned through observation and experience. “We do not have, let's say, the training of a professional tourist guide.” (A pair of community organizations at Laguna de Sonso do offer workshops and mentorship for bird guiding.) Bedoya Betancourth, 24, says he’s been guiding birdwatching tours since he was 14. “We interpret everything that this beautiful territory has,” said Bedoya Betancourth, who wore a pair of binoculars around his neck.   Bedoya Betancourth started guiding because he loves birds, and he’s good at it. He can imitate the calls of around 30 species, he said. (I obviously asked him to demonstrate, and he impressively whistled the repetitive up-and-down call of a marsh bird called the gray-cowled wood-rail.) But it was also a way to earn money for his family, he said. He makes about $35 for each guiding trip, not including tip, and he’ll lead several trips a month. He supplements his income by making wood carvings to sell to tourists and locals.  “Birdwatching for me and for the group of interpreters is one of the economic activities that has been able to keep the community afloat,” said Maria Omaira Rendon Rayo, a community leader at Laguna de Sonso.  The birding economy gives people a reason to stay in the community, she said, and offers an alternative to careers that might attract violence, such as cultivating and selling drugs. By training kids, the laguna and its community organizations are also helping build a conservation ethic that will last for decades. “If you are receiving economic income from an activity such as conservation, then you want to conserve more,” said Rendon Rayo, who works with a local organization called Asociación de Productores Agropecuarios del Porvenir, which helps restore forests by planting trees and trains birding guides in Laguna de Sonso. “You want to help plant more trees. You want to help keep the laguna clean.” Nature tourism is not an unequivocal force of good. It actually often harms the environment, as researchers like Ralf Buckley have documented. Tourists have inadvertently introduced invasive species to places like the Galapagos Islands, snorkelers and divers have damaged coral, including in the Great Barrier Reef, and hotels are commonly built atop natural habitat. There’s also an exploitation issue: In many cases tourism companies are owned by foreigners, limiting the benefits that flow to local communities, on which they often depend. Plus, as a place swells with wealthy tourists, the cost of necessities like housing and food can rise, making it unlivable for locals.  Birdwatching tourism in Colombia has so far managed to avoid many of these pitfalls. It has some guardrails built in, Ocampo-Peñuela said. For one, birding doesn’t work well in large groups — they scare away birds and make it hard to spot something fluttering far away — and smaller groups have a lighter environmental impact. One of the lodges I visited capped the number of tourists to 10. Another said there are days when they will turn visitors away. What’s more is that finding rare and endemic species, which birders are most drawn to, typically requires local expertise. That helps keep money within local communities.  Then there’s the most important guardrail: Birdwatching tourism doesn’t work if it’s not sustainable. Even if you put out fruit, the birds won’t come if they have no habitat — no forest, no wetland. Birding is not like going to the zoo, where you can always expect to see animals. It’s in the economic interest of the birdwatching industry to make sure ecosystems remain healthy.  “You can’t do this business without conserving,” Javier Rubio, who runs another birdwatching destination, called La Florida, at his property northwest of Cali. “If you don't conserve, you put your future as a business at risk. If you start cutting down trees and damaging the forest, [the birds] will be left without food, which is the reason why they are here.” Doña Dora says one of her goals is to earn enough money so that her son can buy forested land around their home. He wants to conserve it, she told me. “That’s the idea for the future,” Elber, her son, told me, “to make sure that the birds continue to live in a healthy ecosystem.” The industry is still young, so the full extent of its environmental impact has yet to be seen. People involved in growing birdwatching tourism say it’s critical that Colombians, and especially people in rural, bird-filled regions, determine what the industry ultimately looks like. “It’s necessary that we Colombians define what kind of birdwatching tourism we want,” said Carlos Mario Wagner, the founder and director of Colombia BirdFair and one of the country’s most well-known birders.  Birding tourism shouldn’t just cater to foreigners, he said, but also to locals. “Something that makes me very happy is that Colombians are increasingly hiring guides,” Wagner told me. Birding has given Colombians an opportunity to reconnect with their homeland following the peace agreement, he said. It instills in them a sense of pride for a version of Colombia that’s known for nature, not violence. The birding industry will ultimately never be huge, Ocampo-Peñuela says. While it’s growing globally — faster than other forms of ecotourism, she’s found — it will likely remain niche, limited by the small number of people who want to travel to rural places to look at birds, often very early in the morning. “You have to have the right personality,” she told me.  So it’s not like birdwatching alone will fix Colombia’s problems and raise the rural class out of poverty.  Yet what it offers is incredibly special. Not just money for local communities, alternative career paths, and real incentives to save forests, but also something that’s harder to quantify. On a rainy afternoon in October, I visited Rubio at La Florida. Like Doña Dora, Rubio has a homemade bird feeder in his yard constructed with branches and pieces of fruit. It attracted a different cast of avian visitors. Here, the star was the multicolored tanager, a colorful species found only in the mountain forests of Colombia. My favorite, however, was the crimson-rumped toucanet, which is essentially a mini toucan. They’re bright green with rust-colored beaks that seem far too big for their bodies.  Over my fourth cup of black coffee, Rubio told me he was a criminal lawyer for nearly three decades before getting into the birdwatching business. A few years ago, he invited friends to his home to go birding. They saw the multicolored tanager and told him that his property — which abuts a tropical forest — has enormous potential to become a birdwatching destination.  Eager to live a more relaxing life, Rubio, 56, quit his job as a lawyer and started building a tourism business.  “I feel extremely good doing this,” Rubio told me. “I often feel like I’m giving happiness to people. Almost unanimously the people who come say, ‘This is a paradise.’ When you start birdwatching, you start to feel attracted not only to birds but to the peaceful environment of nature.” This is a point that nearly every birder I spoke to made: Caring about birds is a gateway to caring about nature, of seeing its true worth.  “It is a gradual process,” Rubio told me, as we sat on a covered deck as it rained, watching a multicolored tanager bounce around in the branches a few feet away. “You first contemplate them, then you begin to understand them, and then you begin to preserve them. That is the path taken by the one who takes up this habit of birdwatching.”

Animals
Business
Conservation

Sweden begins wolf hunt as it aims to halve endangered animal’s population

Five entire families can be killed, totalling 30 wolves, in move campaigners say is illegal under EU lawSweden’s wolf hunt starts on Thursday, with the country aiming to halve the population of the endangered predator.The Swedish government has given the green light for five entire wolf families, a total of 30 wolves, to be killed in a hunt campaigners say is illegal under EU law. Under the Berne convention, protected species cannot be caused to have their populations fall under a sustainable level. Continue reading...

Sweden’s wolf hunt starts on Thursday, with the country aiming to halve the population of the endangered predator.The Swedish government has given the green light for five entire wolf families, a total of 30 wolves, to be killed in a hunt campaigners say is illegal under EU law. Under the Berne convention, protected species cannot be caused to have their populations fall under a sustainable level.Sweden’s wolf population dropped by almost 20% in 2022-23, and there are now 375 recorded individuals. The decline is due to increased hunting pressure, and the government announced earlier this year that it intended to halve the population, with 170 wolves becoming the new minimum level for “favourable conservation status”, instead of the current minimum of 300.Critics say this will endanger the wolf population, which has historically had a fragile stronghold in Sweden, partly due to overhunting. Sweden had no breeding wolf population from 1966 until 1983, and the species is listed in the country as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list.The plans are part of a wider trend, with the EU intending to loosen rules around wolf persecution, allowing countries to increase the number they can kill.The European Commission is considering revising its habitats directive to reflect the fact that wolf numbers have increased, particularly in alpine and forested regions of Scandinavia and central Europe. Farmers say the increased population poses a threat to livestock such as sheep.Earlier this month, members of the Berne convention on the conservation of European wildlife and natural habitats voted to change the status of wolves from a “strictly protected” to a “protected” species. This change will enter into force on 7 March 2025 and will make it easier for the EU to change the habitats directive to allow more wolves to be shot.But environmentalists have said that instead of changing the laws to allow wolves to be culled, farmers can take preventive measures with electric fencing.“We are very critical to the path that the EU is now taking, downgrading the protection status of the wolf,” said Magnus Orrebrant, the chair of the Swedish Carnivore Association. “If the EU follows up the latest Berne convention decision by changing the wolf’s protection status in the habitat directive, the result will be very negative not only for the wolves, but for all wildlife in Europe.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion“In Sweden, it will have no immediate impact on the wolf population, since the Swedish government since 2010 has been blatantly disregarding the wolf’s special protection status, allowing a yearly licensed quota hunt and thereby breaking EU law. We filed a formal complaint to the EU commission, leading to an infringement procedure against Sweden, as yet to no avail.”Léa Badoz, the wildlife programme officer at Eurogroup for Animals, a lobby group, said: “The wolf is unfortunately the latest political pawn, a victim of misinformation. Downgrading protection will not solve the challenges of coexistence, nor help farmers.”The Swedish environmental protection agency has been contacted for comment.

Animals
Government
Sustainable

Suggested Viewing

Karibu Nyumbani

“Karibu Nyumbani” translates as “Welcome to my Home” in Swahili. Guides in the Maasai Mara have a deep-rooted pride, knowledge, and love for wildlife. This film encapsulates that passion from the perspective of George Osono, a guide in Mara North Conservancy, who completely embodies this spirit of caring for nature. Throughout the film, you meet Half Tail, Lola's cubs and the other iconic members of the Marsh Pride, Kweli the Cheetah and her three cubs as they prepare for adulthood, and an impressive elephant named Edwin. This film is visual portrait of the Maasai Mara's majestic wildlife, and the stories of the extraordinary animals that call it home. The film encourages people to see the beauty of these animals, recognise how fragile their existence is and in turn care more about protecting them.

Conservation
Animals
Nature

TO SEE THE SNOW LEOPARD

“To see a snow leopard is to see God.” It’s a film about the search of the snow leopard - a beautiful and rare animal. There are only a few thousand of them left on the planet. Most of the animals have been given names but almost no one has seen them. This is a story about the mystery of human’s contact with another life, with wild nature, and the search for the lost source of inner strength. Scientists, hunters, shamans, tourists - the leopard sees them, but they do not see him.

Animals

Return of the Buffalo

The Lakota people on the Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota welcome buffalo back to their land with hopes that this reunion will restore their cultural, physical, spiritual, and economic health.

Animals
Indigenous
Social Justice

On the Brink

A short movie explaining how sea lice coming from fish farms in British Columbia are harming wild salmon to the brink of extinction.

Animals
Agriculture
Extinction

Primal State

Set at the Leonabelle Turnbull Birding Center, Port Aransas, Texas, the film is supportive of the international efforts to utilize wastewater treatment facilities as bird sanctuaries. The film features an original jazz score and commentary by naturalist Jeff Anderson and provides a glimpse of some of the diversity of bird life found along the Texas Coast while conjuring a Zen-like union with nature.

Animals
Music
Conservation

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